Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] ebuild function to show package changelog

[William Hubbs]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 04:51:02PM +0100, Angelo Arrifano wrote:
> On Sex, 2010-03-12 at 09:33 -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 04:16:05PM +0100, Angelo Arrifano wrote:
> > > Hello all,
> > >
> > > [Speaking as user] I find myself many times stumbling through package
> > > ChangeLogs to see what is new/changed after a emerge -u world. As some
> > > of you might agree, this is time consuming.
> > >
> > > What do you people think on a new pkg_changelog function that would
> > > instruct the ebuild how to retrieve this kind of information from the
> > > package? Most of packages have a somewhat standard place for it in the
> > > source tree, so I guess a default pkg_changelog function could, in
> > > theory, be implemented.
> > >
> > > This function could be then called at user request by means of e.g.
> > > emerge --showchangelog <atom> or at the end of emerge update (controlled
> > > through a FEATURES="show-changelog" or something).
> >
> >  Actually there is already an option for emerge to show the changelogs
> >  of packages that will be upgraded.  Take a look at the --changelog
> >  option for emerge.  It can be used along with --pretend to show you the
> >  changelogs of packages that will be upgraded.
>
> For a moment, you really tricked me into believing I've been missing
> this feature. Specially by reading man emerge:
> "This will show the ChangeLog entries for all the packages"
>               btw: shouldn't it read "ebuilds" here? /\

To me, if you change that wording to "ebuilds", you mean there will be a
separate changelog for each *.ebuild file, so I would disagree with this
change.

> What I meant originally was to show the ChangeLog of the package
> (ChangeLog inside source tree), not the ebuild ChangeLog.

Not all upstreams provide changelogs (take a look at openrc as an
example), so I'm not sure we could do this.  Also, if we did, which file
should we show (ChangeLog, NEWS, README ?) and how much of the file
should we show?

I'm not sure that there is an easy way to implement something like this.

William